It's taken me a long time to get here, lots of fights in the diaries at Daily Kos, lots of defending my position, but I've changed my mind now.

Bush has to be impeached, even though he won't be removed from office.

It has nothing to do with the Iraq War, or with Valerie Plame, or Jack Abramoff or the US Attorneys or Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or any of that other stuff. He has to be impeached because of two simple words:

Unitary Executive

Everything that Bush has done over the last six years has been leading up to this--telling Congress they are irrelevant to the process of governance. The signing statements, for instance, were an early indicator of the attitude, but Bush and Cheney have, in this most recent standoff over documents and investigations, told Congress that they don't matter, and for the sake of the future of the Republic, Congress has to act as a body to repudiate that attitude, lest it become as powerless as the Roman Senate in the time of Augustus. There's only one way to do that: impeachment.

I understood why the Republican-led Congress rolled over for their guy from 2001-2006--their individual power increased exponentially. But one would hope that they would have at least the limited foresight to know that their hold on power would not last forever, and that whatever powers they ceded to Bush would also be ceded to whoever was President next.

But they didn't, and by all indications, they still don't, because with few exceptions, the Republican Congressional Caucus still supports Bush unquestioningly. Party over country. Present power over future problems.

This is where we stand as a nation: on the knife's edge of transforming a system of checks and balances into a dictatorship with a recommending body. Congress must reassert its authority. It must say, with a bipartisan voice, that no President is above the law. It must vote to impeach both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, even if it doesn't result in removing either from office.